Electronic mail, often abbreviated to e-mail, email, or originally eMail, is a store-and-forward method of writing, sending, receiving and saving messages over electronic communication systems. The term “e-mail” applies to systems including: (i) internet email systems based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol; (ii) network systems based on other protocols: and/or (iii) to various mainframe-based, minicomputer-based, or internet-based systems using protocols particular to a systems vendor or on the same protocols used on public networks.
Email is a widely utilized communication tool in the computer network environment. Email is an especially critical business tool for communication in large, geographically-distributed organizations. These large organizations are frequently challenged by the task of keeping track of personnel who are available to work or respond to issues as the issues arise. These issues are oftentimes communicated from one person to the other within the organization via email and the recipient of the email is then expected to respond to or resolve the issue.
To help email senders know which email receivers are available to work or to respond to issues sent via email, most email systems contain an “out-of-office” notification function. This function alerts an email sender if the recipient is not going to be checking email for a specific period of time, perhaps due to an illness or a vacation, and often includes a return date or end date. Sending email to a recipient who has enabled the out-of-office notification function causes the email system to send a return email (an “out-of-office responsive email communication”) in response to a received email (the “sent-by-sender email communication”). This out-of-office responsive email communication is generally sent from the recipient's email system back to the sender of the sent-by-sender email communication. The receipt of the out-of-office responsive email communication can help the sender realize, depending upon circumstances, that the sender may need to take other actions relating to the substantive content of the sent-by-sender email communication due to the apparent temporary unavailability of the recipient of that email message. For example, if the sender's email contains time sensitive information that must be handled before the recipient's return date, the sender might choose to re-route the request of the sent-by-sender email communication to another person within the organization so that time sensitive issues are reliably handled in a timely manner.
With the present out-of-office notification function, the sender often does not remember the recipient's return date or may not be given a return date, and the sender may periodically send additional sent-by-sender type email communications to the recipient, only to cause additional out-of-office responsive email communications to be sent back. This is particularly true when a recipient has set the out-of-office function to be operative for an extended period of time. If the sender has time-sensitive communication that must be addressed and there is a second or backup person (other than the out-of-office recipient) who is capable of responding to the sender's email request, the sender may lose valuable time through the redundant actions of resending and repeatedly receiving multiple out-of-office notifications before taking appropriate action.
Moreover, email recipients may experience an overflow of received email communications in their emailboxes after only a few days of the out-of-office function being used, because the recipient generally has limited or non-existent access to his emailbox and therefore cannot take actions (such as deleting emails) to counter the build-up of received email communications. Very few prior art methods focus on management of mailboxes with the objective of reducing the amount of emails filling up the recipient's mailbox. Most prior art email management solutions focus on archiving and redistribution of incoming emails and result in producing more stored email communications, which serves to exacerbate potential emailbox overflow type problems.
An example of one prior art email retraction system is set forth in U.S. Publication No. US2005/0223064 (“Salerno”), which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. The Salerno system provides an email sender the option of retracting his sent message. This retraction can occur locally before the sent-by-sender email is sent, as well as at the server side, but this retraction option is based exclusively on the unilateral decision of the sender under the logic of the Salerno system.